The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman, review: 'full of supple metaphors'

Tim Martin lauds a post-apocalyptic landscape

Literary dystopias are 10 a penny these days, and you can’t swing a (dead, half-chewed) cat in the crowded young-adult field without hitting a plucky heroine getting by in the post-apocalypse. But Sandra Newman’s adult novel The Country of Ice Cream Star, which follows bands of warring teenagers through a fallen America where adults have died of the plague, has one significant trick up its sleeve. What sets it apart is its language, a propulsive future dialect stitched together from bits of the old and the new. “Our people be a tarry night sort, and we skinny and long,” explains its black 15-year-old narrator on the first page. “We flee like a dragonfly over water, we fight like 10 guns, and we be bell to see. Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love.”

The touchstone here is Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s mystical one-off novel set in a future Kent bombed back to the Stone Age. “Coming back with the boar on a poal we come a long by the rivver it wer hevvyer woodit in there.” That’s Hoban. “Town be a sally mess. Tents up since the yester rain, their orange color gone in grime. Is muddy trash around, and ashy circles from the evening fires.” That’s Newman. For the first time – and certainly to a greater degree than David Mitchell’s attempts in Cloud Atlas — the comparison almost holds up.

Newman puts huge effort into the writing in Ice Cream Star, and it’s a treat, full of supple metaphors and rhythmic lyricism. One child is dismissed as “wise as dirty feet”; another is “proud as hatred”. The narrator’s monologue has the intimate address of conversation but the intellectual stretch of prose: “Yo, when I leave, the sun be scarcely risen to its height, although the morning feel so long. This day feel old and tired of me.”

So much of the world-building is done through language that the story has a lot to live up to — and it’s here that Ice Cream Star, not always helpfully, feels more familiar. As its tough-but-tender protagonist storms across America to find a cure for the disease that carries off children when they hit adulthood, we encounter nutty Christian sacrifice cults, enclaves of armed Marines, rape and murder from Russian soldiers and the now-obligatory love triangle.

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We are, in short, back in Dystopialand again, and the serious thinking that Newman has done about the roots of an American catastrophe can sometimes slip through the cracks in her rambling 600-page plot. But there’s plenty to recommend, and this is an obvious candidate for Hunger Games-hungry Hollywood to pluck out the linguistic heart that makes it special. Take a look before that happens.